To the Editor:
Ben Cohen points out that anti-Semitism is becoming salonfähig again [“The Big Lie Returns,” February], but he does not tackle the reason. Why is there a growing belief that the Jews are “the authors of their own misfortune”? That the enemies of the Jews have gained control of the definition of anti-Semitism explains little and solves nothing.
We know that anti-Semitism in the past was largely propagated by the Church. The Jews were execrated as the killers of Christ. The virtuous despised them as Satan’s children. Across two millennia the Jews were exploited as the enemies of the West’s prevailing ethos.
Those fires are no longer stoked. Yet the Jews are again despised. Why? Because they again are accused of standing in opposition to the ethos of the age, against its faith in equality and democracy.
World War II’s end exposed the vast killing fields of Auschwitz. The depths of evil to which racism can descend were made clear there. Seismic waves of repulsion shook the West. They caused the collapse of colonialism, segregation, and social barriers built on race. The status of women rose, and homophobia was declined. America began to live up to its principles more scrupulously. Human equality and democracy became the dominant faith.
Beneficiaries included the people of the Holy Land. Their sovereign rights to their ancestral land, already acknowledged as such more than 30 years earlier, were granted them. The English departed.
That, however, unleashed a conflict that saw the Arabs, who outnumbered the Jews by more than 50 to 1, determined to never accept a Jewish state in their midst. Israel was then forced to ceaselessly defend not only its boundaries, but also its existence.
She has not only continually prevailed on the battlefield; she has consistently trounced her adversaries in all other contests. The six million Jews of Israel, with no appreciable natural resources, have surpassed their 400 million oil-rich neighbors in every field from culture to agriculture, in every contest from Nobel prizes to industrial production, by every metric from human-rights standards to per capita income.
As Israel’s victories and the Jews’ predominance have become more routine, Israel has endured punishment for surviving. Her success is dismissed as the essence of unfairness. Israel is seen as obstructing humanity’s path.
Jewry’s extraordinary success in America is a more muted but no less resented iteration of the Israeli scandal. This hideous picture needs to be dismantled, and can be. But first and foremost its existence must be acknowledged.
Marcel Salzberger
New York City
To the Editor:
It is a shame that Ben Cohen does not, in his admirable essay, also mention the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia’s Working Definition of Anti-Semitism, which declares that the person who believes himself to have been discriminated against is the best judge of whether he has been discriminated against, and it is not for the alleged discriminator to sit in judgment on the matter. Of course, in the last analysis, if the situation is serious enough, there will be (at least in properly organized liberal democracies) an independent and, one hopes, impartial tribunal to decide the facts of the matter. This is also the general situation in British anti-discrimination law: The alleged victims are the best judge of whether they have been discriminated against.
Most important, it is not for the Mearsheimers of this world, and certainly not the Gilad Atzmons, to declare themselves free of prejudice and incapable of discrimination.
It is, in this context, significant that the major British trade union for university academics, the University and College Union (UCU), decided at its 2011 Annual Conference to be no longer bound by the EUMC Working Definition. Presumably, its executive committee will, in future, be the body that determines whether anything the union or its officers have done could be construed as anti-Semitic.
Two points are relevant here: First, UCU has a history, from about 2005 on, of attempting and failing to make a boycott of Israeli (and only Israeli) universities, union policy (an effort defeated, not by votes at annual conferences, but by British law); and second, no effort has been made to make the union itself the sole arbiter of prejudice or discrimination against any other group in society, only Jews.
Brian Goldfarb
London, England
To the Editor:
Ben Cohen’s article on anti-Semitism not only exposes the increasingly blatant anti-Semitism of the anti-Israel lobby, but it also does a great service by turning the spotlight on Jewish anti-Semitism, and especially on Israeli Jewish leftist anti-Semites. While Gilad Atzmon is clearly deranged and shunned even by most of the bash-Israel movement in the United Kingdom, there are hundreds of radical anti-Israel anti-Semites running around Israel. They’re only marginally less anti-Semitic than Atzmon, and some of them are even tenured faculty at Israeli universities.
There, in their cushy positions financed by donors and Israeli taxpayers, they spend their days churning out anti-Israel hate propaganda. They initiate “boycott, divest” economic warfare against their own country, demonize their own country as a fascist apartheid regime, break the law, undermine democracy, endorse violence and terrorism, and lead a McCarthyist campaign to deny freedom of speech those who criticize them. They operate as an academic fifth column, as people who support and identify with the enemies of their country in all things.
Steven Plaut
University of Haifa, Israel
To the Editor:
In “The Big Lie Returns,” Ben Cohen makes a number of cogent points. Even he, however, does not touch what is a third rail of Jewish discourse. If Reform, Humanistic, and Conservative Jews can interpret, modify, and even vote on clear requirements detailed in the Torah and commentaries, why should other Jews not be permitted to create any and all definitions of anti-Semitism? If certain Jews can deconstruct and alter the rules and regulations written millennia ago, then it is patently obvious that other Jews should be able to condemn Israel and the Jews who support that state. Cultural relativism and diversity are odd constructs; one never knows who the next victim will be.
Harold Reisman
Carlsbad, California
Ben Cohen writes:
In his elegant summary of the state of Israel’s achievements, Marcel Salzberger posits that liberal opinion resents the Jewish state because its existence supposedly contradicts the “prevailing ethos” of equality and democracy that crystallized after the Second World War. My reading of the postwar period is different: If the era of decolonization allowed anti-Semitism to reinvent itself as anti-Zionism, then this had little to do with the values of human equality and democracy, which were summarily violated in postcolonial states from Algeria to Pakistan, and far more to do with the intemperate discourse of anti-imperialism and national liberation that still animates the Western left. As I outlined in my essay, the fixation with Jewish power, which drives so much of the current discussion about pro-Israel advocacy in America today, springs from this warped sociology.
Brian Goldfarb correctly points out that the EUMC Working Definition of anti-Semitism privileges the perspective of the victim of discrimination. This mode of interpretation stems from the soul-searching in the UK that followed the shocking murder of Stephen Lawrence, a black London teenager, at the hands of racist thugs, and the subsequent indifference shown to his family by the Metropolitan Police and other authorities. As the behavior of the British academic labor union shows, however, it is an interpretation that does not apply when the victims are Jews. Herein lies the problem with the EUMC Definition: In presenting the Jewish people as only one more minority group, it ignores the wider political context that enables Israel’s adversaries to successfully present their anti-Semitism as a form of anti-racism. As a guide for law enforcement when it comes to hate crimes, the Definition is, then, perfectly adequate; but as a framework for countering anti-Semitic discourse, it has failed.
Harold Reisman makes an interesting point. I am not persuaded, however, that there can be multiple understandings of anti-Semitism, in the way that there are multiple understandings of Jewish religious practice. The small minority of Jews whose hatred of Israel leads them to traffic in anti-Semitism should not be given a free pass in the name of tolerating diverse opinions.
I am grateful to Steven Plaut for his comments. The fifth column he describes in Israel certainly has its echoes here in America. One thinks primarily of the “Israel-Firster” libel advanced by groups such as Media Matters for America, as well as the rush by liberal Jewish groups such as J Street to protect those who make this charge from being branded as anti-Semitic. Frankly, the Jewish philanthropic institutions who support such organizations invite comparison with the victim who tells his mugger that there’s another 50 bucks in his coat pocket that he overlooked.
